160177 PS Subjects in non-indoeuropean languages (2024S)

This course classifies as "PS Grammatik und Struktur einer nicht-indogermanischen Sprache."

The course investigates the concept "subjecthood", how it is reflected in non-indoeuropean languages and how it therein differs from what we perceive as subjects in well-studied languages like English or German. We will discuss whether subjecthood merely describes a syntactic position in the clausal spine or if it rather corresponds to a bundle of functions, like reflexive binding, PRO in control configurations, imperative formation or the derviation of headless relative clauses. Dixon 1994 suggests that subjects comprise all these functions in one argument; we will examine whether this is true for several languages or if there are languages where "subjecthood" does not converge to one argument but is split up onto different arguments - and what this means for a syntactic analysis of subjects as well as the perception of "subjecthood" as a language-universal property.

We will take a look at languages which do not have a straightforwardly determined subject: Austronesian languages as well as some ergative languages. We will investigate how subjects relate to case, agreement and topichood in these languages, and further how they behave with respect to passivization, control, imperatives, binding and A'-extraction (like wh-movement). Different syntactic approaches to subjecthood will be interweaved with typological-empirical data. The main focus of the course lies on pointing out the difficulties of defining the the function "subject" cross-linguistically as well as tying it to a specific structural position.